Delphic Maxim 41: Despise insolence

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

41. Despise insolence

My friend David has frequently pointed out the fact that these maxims often have a very active verb in them. Today’s maxim calls on us to despise insolence. It’s a really intense ask, because despising something runs much deeper than simply disliking: there’s a dimension of spurning and active intensity to it. Why does insolence get such a savage verb?

I imagine in part it is because insolence itself goes to the heart of our relationships with other people and their roles in society. We know from some of the other maxims — for example those that explore the idea of honour — that our sense of virtue and goodness are enmeshed in our participation in society. Insolence is a kind of disrespect and rudeness that leads a person to exit or ignore good relations with a person. At an individual level, it is a kind of defiant rudeness — not just to a person in a position of authority, but to the very social grace that allows us to get along with one another.

In writing these responses to these maxims, I generally try to avoid getting too caught up in the current affairs of the world, because that runs the very high probability that my political views get dragged into my writing. However, I’m writing this in the shadow of a massacre in Christchurch, where an Australian man has killed fifty innocent civilians in New Zealand, simply for practicing their faith. And I haven’t had much to say about that on social media, so now is probably a better time to develop my response to that as well.

I don’t regard an act of mass murder as insolence — that’s too weak a term. This is an instance of evil, which I have argued earlier is a rare thing but one that seeks people out. The calculated, clinical and cold planning that went into this act of terrorism — like Oslo, and like New York — marks it out, in my mind, as an evil act. I don’t understand how a person can hold any political ideology in tension with so many innocent human lives and choose to destroy so many families. That’s the tear in the moral fabric that makes this act so evil, so monstrous. It’s not the act of a madman — it’s too cold and rational to be mad. It’s the act of a horrible person, radicalised by a frightful ideological worldview, one that somehow is able to justify the killing of so many innocents.

The response of one Australian Senator, however, brings us closer to the domain of insolence — though I note that Fraser Anning’s remarks elsewhere and at other times do hew closely to the same ideological positions as the terrorist in Christchurch. At the time of this tragedy, Anning chose to blame the victims and the Muslim faith for a mass killing that was perpetrated against them. This up-ending of social grace should be despised — Anning isn’t just wrong and insolent, he is actively seeking to divide people and to destroy a peaceful society.

Anning’s position is complicated by the fact that he is a Senator, and can’t be removed (unless he fell foul some very heavily circumscribed areas of the constitution — Section 44, for instance — which he does not). In a few months, he will be gone. But given that we despise his insolence, given that the man seems to get away with — even benefit from — remarks that are so clearly designed to disrupt and destroy good social relations, how can he be checked?

Respect, I think, needs to be earned. And the status that public office lends a person comes with a responsibility to act responsibly, to respect the social order that awards an elected person their title. For a Senator to so callously make racist, thoughtless remarks after such a tragedy, it diminishes their office — and it opens them up to proportional response.

A 17 year old in Melbourne egged Fraser Anning — an act that would typically qualify as ‘insolent’, but I don’t regard it that way. Under normal circumstances, we should despise an act of insolence like that — not because it is directed at a person in a position of authority, but because people have an innate dignity that egging undermines. However, when a person behaves the way Fraser Anning did, and there is no apparent consequence to his words, then this act of insolence becomes an act of justice. The ridicule that follows the egging — keeping in mind that the kid was still arrested, as he should be for breaking the law — that ridicule was an act of justice. It shows how pathetic a figure Anning really is — that a kid with an egg could make the fool of a racist old man with a coterie of goons defending him.

So we despise insolence, because we should have respect for the people around us in our society — especially when tragedy rips into the hearts of so many people. And if someone in a position of higher status in society seeks to make a tragedy worse, then I don’t think it’s insolent to smash an egg on them: the egg is a corrective out of which some small justice might be hatched.